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So sue me if sometimes I get too smitten with those who write compellingly and with vision about what all of this connective learning stuff means for the long term, but I love to read stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time. Case in point is this post by Mark Pesce titled “Fluid Learning” which I read first last week and have reread a few time since. I know it’s not free of holes, but I have to admit that the picture he paints of higher education in the near future resonates with a lot of my own thinking, and it’s got me ruminating even more deeply on what all of this means for my 9 and 11 year old in terms of what their education is preparing them for.

Start with this:

The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning.

That will at least give you a sense of where he’s going with this, and I’ll give you the briefest of synopsis with the hope you’ll read the whole thing.

He starts with the story of RateMyProfessors.com and the influence it’s having on decision making by students and universities in terms of the courses they take and the people they hire respectively. During a PLP session last night where we were talking about this, Robin Ellis chimed in that her son had relied heavily on the site throughout his college career, and I’m sure others would attest to that as well. (I pinged a few of my former students on Facebook and they all were avid users.) While this wasn’t the original intent of the guys who created the site

…knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

But what I’m really chewing on is the idea that we can do much of what higher ed offers on our own these days. That, I think, has huge implications for my kids and for the way we prepare students for their learning futures. Pesce asks

Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?…Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?

And, to really push that thought:

In this near future world, students are the administrators.

Whether or not my kids decide to go to college, the question for me right now is shouldn’t my school system be preparing them equally as well for a world where traditional college is not the only route to academic success? Shouldn’t my kids get some concept of how to gather their own information, find their own teachers, develop their own collaborative classrooms and write their own curricula? I mean at the very least, shouldn’t we let kids know that is an option these days?

And as the role of students changes, so to does the role of teachers and classrooms. Teachers are mentors and facilitators (not a new idea, I know) and classrooms can be anywhere.

The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom.

Pesce ends with four recommendations. First, “Capture Everything”:

This should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

Second, “Share Everything”:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

Third, “Open Everything” not just using open source, but creating “device interdependence” and in taking down the filters:

Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital…Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

And fourth, “Only Connect”, connecting students to their teachers and their peers:

Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education… Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

I know this last is a huge challenge for teachers and schools, but the reality is that we can connect to our teachers any time we like these days, and there are always teachers available. It’s just another way in which the traditional classroom is looking less and less like the real world.

Read the whole thing and, if you like, come back here and push the conversation in terms of K-12. I’ll write more about this later, but I am approaching the breaking point in terms of what my kids are getting at school. I’ve got to figure out a better way…

[...] virtual schools).Here is a thought on the future of higher education with a long follow up for K-12 education here. Of course I shouldn’t be surprised the Dean Shareski also wrote a post on the subject [...]

I agree that it is important to reach students and therefore the rating of teachers is probably a good thing. But it depends on what the student wants and what a high school student wants in a teacher while in high school is not the same as what they wished they had after high school. It depends on the maturity of the student and some are and some are not.

My concern is with the whole notion of everyone being an expert. I think the training required to become a teacher at any level ceases to be a factor online. I love Wikipedia but I know I have to be careful because of the way it is assembled. Dubious stuff is edited out, quite expeditiously for the most part, but there is still the time the dubious stuff remains posted.

Also too many people tend to join groups (online or off) that endorse their own views, as a result self directed learning can put a person in a bubble that excludes dissenting views. That is one of the values of a school, you cannot pick your classmates and are forced to interact with those whose views are different.

I find the online world to be an exciting place and I know it offers things the conventional classroom cannot offer. I have been teaching online since the late 1990′s. I have had students from around the world without having to leave my living room. My students, as well, are exposed to views and perspective they would not be likely to get otherwise. As a teacher few things can beat the thrill that comes from that.

The local school district, I think, is too much like the medieval village. We grow up academically without ever leaving the small communities in which we were raised (and even if raised in a New York City or Los Angeles they are still small compared to the world community). I believe in the doors technology opens, but I am concerned that we are too quick sometimes to shut the door on other things that have value and expand our minds and perceptions.

I guess I want to see the best that the new social technologies have to offer wedded to the best that the traditional liberal arts education has to offer. I believe in elitism to a certain extent. I think training and expertise mean something, though they certainly are not everything.

Thanks for the thoughts. I don’t disagree with you when you say that you want the best of the two wedded together. And I think training and expertise mean something. But are we just measuring those by the degrees awarded? Do we have to do that any more? Did we really ever have to? I like what Pesce says in terms of returning to a 13th Century model where we train at the (virtual) feet of masters now that so many masters are available to us. My deep desire is not for my school system (K-12) to disappear as much as it is for it to prepare my kids to find their own experts, study well with other knowledge seekers, and pursue a program of mastery wherever they can find it. I want my school system to teach my kids to desire diversity in their groups, to revel in dissent and confusion.

Real teachers know teachers don’t know everything. As a teacher I learn from my students and often find their views interesting and perceptive. I think of myself as a tour guide leading folks through some terrain I have previously traveled and know some things to point out but am aware there are many things there to be seen that I have never seen.

I also know as a teacher that many who think themselves teachers are not and I am not sure how we teach our students discernment. Perhaps they need to learn by trial and error. I worry about the networks students build. Not just because they may be getting bad information but because they may lack depth. As an English teacher I am glad I was forced to take mathematics (something I would not likely have done on my own) because it broadened my mind, I think. I worry that students will not add that depth on their own. The key is to make them curious. Curiosity is the best teacher.

What is online learning and how does it differ from any other kind of learning? There is a distinction to be made between learning and teaching. Now, obviously there is a difference between online teaching and other types of teaching but I am not so sure that this distinction can be made about the mental processes associated with learning. In many ways, and what I think you are saying here, online learning can be more effective for some things and face to face hands-on learning can be more effective for others. To me, the rush to label online teaching as online learning or distance learning has wounded the progress we need to make to keep up with this disruptive innovation.

The internet is just one of many disruptive innovations effecting our schools. With the vast data and information available online I think it is easy to forget that while the internet allows all of these machines with data on them to be networked that behind those machines are other real people. The internet is not only becoming the total sum of all human knowledge and information but also a medium through which to connect people. The comments on this blog post are a perfect example of this. I reach out and I can tap into the wisdom of others, not just the information they post.

Another disruptive innovation is school choice. This can come in the form of homeschooling, online schools, charter schools, open enrollment, or private schools. It can also come in the form of unschooling. The role the internet plays in all of these choices, especially homeschooling, is it reduces the need for much of what the teacher did before. Data becomes routine and according to Daniel Pink anything that is routine can be outsourced or automated.

So, to bring these slightly unrelated topics together, if learning is learning and we make little distinction between the modality as far as how we categorize schools then any teacher in a brick and mortar setting can take online teaching strategies and adapt them for their classroom and any online teacher can do the reverse. We do have a better and more useful model of school categorization: Project-based or seat based. In a project-based school teachers could easily apply online teaching strategies to establish a hybrid of what we are seeing today as something that is polarized. A charter school could be set up to operate in this way. Charter schools in Minnesota have been a big disruptive innovation to the public schools by pulling away students and thus pulling away enrollment dollars. I am working now on trying to establish a charter school within a school concept that is project-based and utilizes online teaching strategies to enhance the student’s learning experience. The hosting schools for this charter would lease space for classes and the teachers could have a dual contract and the students could be dual enrolled. Such a system could allow for maximum personalization of the learning experience while making teachers more “productive” and allow districts to keep the programs that make our traditional schools great like the arts, athletics, and extra curricular activities.

Not surprisingly, it seems like the commenters on Pesce’s original post seem to be distracted by the fact that he uses Ratemyprofessor.com as his main example. Personally, I see the whole post as a very compelling argument against the rather arbitrary network filtration we’re forced to work with in public high schools here in the US.

[...]While there may not be a significant difference in how we learn online as opposed to face-to-face there is a difference in how we learn with different types of assessments and teaching strategies. From a funding standpoint we really have two different models: seat time vs. project-based. One involves a talking head and the other authentic assessments and both can be employed in either an online setting or face-to-face[...]

[...] leave a comment » I simple record here the text of an email I sent to my Associate Dean Teaching & Learning that mentions a Will Richardson post about a long, provocative and thought-provoking post about fluid learning by the famous Mark Pesce. Since your last message concerned the wording of acceptable use of laptops by students in class I thought I would pass on a blog article by a reasonably respected educational technology expert, Will Richardson. Will’s blog post about the Ultimate Disruption for Schools is in his words ‘stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time’ can be read at: http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/the-ultimate-disruption-for-schools/ [...]

If a high school degree meant you participated in and passed specific courses? If you had the opportunity to choose to go to the local high school, and/or take some courses online? If there were a dependable rating system to rate the quality of teachers?

Wouldn’t that relieve the fears that student might not receive a well rounded education?

Wouldn’t that give more power to the students to take “ownership” of their own education?

Wouldn’t that require schools to look at the quality of their teachers?

Secondly, if the student consistently choose “easy grader” teachers shouldn’t his or her report card reflect that in a similar manner in which AP classes are adjusted on a report card.

[...] me to other thoughts about how we are preparing our students. I loved these two blogs posts from Will Richardson and Karl Fisch. Both of them make me want to read more, learn more and write more. I can’t [...]

Another interesting video about the New Literacies our students are facing. This video parallels the innovation of the internet and web 2.0 technology, with the invention of writing and books….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs2YPGTEWGU&NR=1

Hi Will — Thanks for posting this and encouraging me to take a look at it during our last PLP session.

I find this notion of fluid learning freeing, but way to loose for k-12.

I believe the new vision of K-12 education is a combination of big picture questions and applying the cutting edge of teaching and learning science. We need to be realistic about what we need to know and be able to do to be good learners and teachers. Are kids born with those skills? No. What are the best ways to teach them?

So how do you push this in K12? We need to really focus on applied skills while learning content. Lehmann is right when he says that Dewey was born 100 years too early. We need to engage kids in active classrooms. Schools are starting to do this (High Tech High, The MET, K12.com) and I think that the wave will happen, but it’s going to take time. I really think it’s about starting new schools to model this type of learning and teaching.

I’m not sure that it’ll be here for your kids, or mine (8, 5, and 3) but maybe by the time they are in HS.

Have you seen it really happening anywhere? You’re the guy who would, right?

I worry about over-reliance on things like ratemyprofessor/ratemyteacher – often the people commenting are either those that are enamored with the teacher (because of easy grades) or those with an axe to grind (because of bad grades). Those in the middle do not get heard.

The idea of fluid learning is not new, and those involved with education as “good teachers” know that. Learning from one’s students is nothing new, nor are those teachers that think they know it all and are there to fill empty vessels. What’s new are the ways in which we can communicate and interact with students and others, or – more precisely – the immediacy of that communication and interaction.